I started off by simply trying to get a clean color scheme going. I’ve always been a huge fan of using a greyscale palette with a single, vibrant color. At first I landed on #14abaa. Deep cyan with white and a dark grey that really worked well together.

As I moved through the various statistics from the script, I started inverting and alternating my colors for variety, while using my font size to emphasize key words or ideas.

About half way through the script for the video, I grew bored of the look of the project. It wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t great. As I began to think about possibilities of what I could do to spice things up, I remembered a tutorial over at Video Copilot that I watched a few weeks ago that taught some really interesting 3D lighting techniques. While I haven’t used any background images here, the light and shadows help to create a lot more interesting detail. I combined the techniques from the tutorial with an optical flare tracked to my light, with a lens texture to add some more depth.

There’s a number of ways to make this happen, but for a recent project I implemented a way to handle it using a simple conditional statement. Basically, i’m checking against a single URL segment and the HTML that is displayed is based upon the results of this check:

<div id="navigation">
	<ul>
		<li><a href="{path='site_index'}Hear">{if segment_1 == "Hear"}<span class="currentnav">Listen </span>{if:else}Listen {/if}</a></li>
		<li><a href="{path='site_index'}Blog">{if segment_1 == "Blog"}<span class="currentnav">Blog </span>{if:else}Blog {/if}</a></li>
		<li><a href="{path='site_index'}Book">{if segment_1 == "Book"}<span class="currentnav">Book </span>{if:else}Book {/if}</a></li>
	</ul>
</div>

Nate is currently a church planter & lead pastor at Jacob’s Well Church in Minneapolis, MN – a church plant that I was largely involved with during my college years.

I’m extremely excited for both Nate and Robyn as they join together to share a life that is wholly and completely focused on pointing everyone they connect with to God’s faithfulness and grace.

Last night we cooked out on the back patio and just spent the evening hanging out and enjoying each other’s company for hours. It was a great time of meeting new friends and sharing life with people who love to love each other. I am so blessed to call these people my friends.

In the realm of video production, in my humble opinion – the shorter a project is, the more difficult it becomes.

Wednesday afternoon, I decided to just walk through the neighborhoods that lined the beach. I found some of the most gorgeous beach houses I’ve ever seen, and was also pleasantly greeted by two little kids running a sun tea stand along the way.

The three days as a whole were extremely refreshing. It’s always nice to get away, especially when the ocean is involved.

In August of 2010 I start my trial subscription with Rdio, an online music subscription service. Since that time, I can probably count on two hands the number of times i’ve opened iTunes on my computer. To make the “conversion” process easy for people interested in switching to a subscription-based service, they’ve implemented a way to pre-load your Rdio collection with all of the albums that currently reside within your iTunes library – making the switch quick and painless.

I’ve basically found that there are two main things that Rdio does really well that iTunes either doesn’t do, or doesn’t do well.

First off, Rdio is much more than a music subscription service – it’s a social music service. It’s changed the way that I discover music. Apple has tried to implement the social aspect to experiencing music online with Ping, but it just hasn’t taken off. People are using it, but it’s not to the point (and I doubt it ever will be) where it has been adopted and used regularly by the mass majority. That said, I think it’d be a stretch to claim that Rdio isn’t also in that boat, but in the realm of professionals whose work is primarily done on and in the web, it’s extremely popular.

Second, Rdio – being a web-based service – syncs well. You almost can’t even say it syncs, since it is strictly streaming online. However, regarding the unlimited subscription, there’s the option to sync music (on a song by song basis) to a mobile device, allowing you to listen even when you’re out of 3G/WiFi coverage.

There’s been talk of an “iTunes Cloud” or the like being added to MobileMe in the near future, but it’s one of the first things that I’ve seen Apple fall by the wayside on. To know that when I log in on any computer, phone or tablet I will have instant access to my entire library, playlists, friends etc is so refreshing in the sense that I don’t have to think about keeping all of my devices on the same page. I have enough to do on a weekly basis, and messing around with mp3′s and a flash drive isn’t even close to being on the priority list, let alone the top of it.

Not owning actual copies of albums isn’t for everyone. Personally, I’d much rather pay $10/mo to have unlimited access to as much music as I want, rather than just paying for and owning a single album each month.

If you haven’t already, give it a shot… you might be surprised. http://rdio.com

For instance, usually I’ll try to take care of most of those little tasks before I begin bigger projects, otherwise it becomes easy to become preoccupied with them later in the day. There’s been days when I tried to think back and account for where the time went, and I realize that the larger blocks of time in which I normally would have utilized for large projects have been broken apart by these small tasks that demand immediate attention. When I take the time to get all of the smaller tasks out of the way at the beginning of the day, I find that I get a lot more accomplished each week.